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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jul/15/hacking-usa
A recent wave of cyber attacks that crippled thousands of computers and websites in the United States and South Korea could have originated from inside Britain, experts have warned. According to security researchers in Vietnam, the source of last week’s string of attacks by the Mydoom virus – which overwhelmed systems belonging to the US Treasury and the office of the South Korean president Lee Myung-Bak – can be traced to the UK. “We have analysed the malware pattern that we received” said Nguyen Minh Duc, a director of Vietnamese security company BKIS, in a post on the company’s blog. “We found a master server located in the UK.” Investigators said they had discovered new details on how the strikes took place by investigating and tracing back the attacks. According to BKIS, infected computers had tried to contact one of eight so-called command and control servers every three minutes. These machines then gave instructions to the hacked PC – generally ordering them to direct traffic straight at victim websites, in attempt to overload them and force them to crash. But these eight servers were themselves being controlled by a single source, which evidence indicated was located somewhere in Britain. “Having located the attacking source in UK, we believe that it is completely possible to find out the hacker,” wrote Nguyen. “This of course depends on the US and South Korean governments.”

Earlier this evening, Alex Jones’ flagship website, Infowars.com, came under a concerted denial of service (DoS) attack. It is unavailable at the time of this report.

The attacks are coming out of Japan. A Whois database search reveals the origin to be the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre in Milton, Australia.

DoS attacks usually consist of concerted efforts to shut down a web server by flooding the computer with requests and consuming its resources so that it is no longer available to users. DoS attacks commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations. Over the last few days, Alex Jones and his websites have covered the so-called swine flu “pandemic” and have built a solid case that the outbreak is part of a larger campaign by the government to frighten the populace and institute martial law as specifically detailed in the Department of Defense’s “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza” and other government documents. Alex Jones is the primary media source calling the government’s bluff on the bogus “pandemic” elevated earlier today to a level 5 under World Health Organization guidelines. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan declared the phase 5 alert after consulting with flu experts from around the world. “All countries should immediately now activate their pandemic preparedness plans,” Chan told reporters in Geneva. “It really is all of humanity that is under threat in a pandemic.”

http://www.thelocal.se/18908.html
The four men connected with The Pirate Bay were found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement by a Swedish court on Friday, delivering a symbolic victory in the entertainment industry’s efforts to put a stop to the sharing of copyrighted material on the internet. “The Stockholm district court has today convicted the four people charged with promoting other people’s infringement of copyright laws,” the court said in a statement.

http://digg.com/d1ohlQ
Time Warner Cable plans to test its controversial, new scheme to have users pay by the gigabyte in Rochester, New York, but the area’s freshman congressman calls usage caps greedy and plans to introduce legislation to stop it. New York Democratic Rep. Eric Massa called TWC’s proposal to switch its 8.4 million cable broadband customers to metered internet billing an “outrageous plan to tax the American people.” Massa, a longtime blogger at the liberal site DailyKos, says he will be joined by a “legion of activists” and called the fight against usage caps a “national issue of generational consequences.” However, Massa’s fight will not get far without support from powerful House members,including Virginia Democrat Rick Boucher who now controls a key committee on telecoms and the internet. Critics say usage caps will cost users more and hurt innovation on the net — especially in new video services, as subscribers begin to calorie-count their internet usage.

http://www.infowars.com/cops-think-linux-use-may-be-sign-of-criminal-behavior/
On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash [pdf] and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a school mailing list identifying another student as gay. The problem? Not only is there no indication that any crime was committed, the investigating officer argued that the computer expertise of the student itself supported a finding of probable cause to seize the student’s property. Should Boston College Linux users be looking over their shoulders? In his application, the investigating officer asked that he be permitted to seize the student’s computers and other personal affects because they might yield evidence of the crimes of “Obtaining computer services by Fraud or Misrepresentation” and “Unauthorized access to a computer system.” Aside from the remarkable overreach by campus and state police in trying to paint a student as suspicious in part because he can navigate a non-Windows computer environment, nothing cited in the warrant application could possibly constitute the cited criminal offenses. There are no assertions that a commercial (i.e. for pay) commercial service was defrauded, a necessary element of any “Obtaining computer services by Fraud or Misrepresentation” allegation. Similarly, the investigating officer doesn’t explain how sending an e-mail to a campus mailing list might constitute “unauthorized access to a computer system.”

https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Germany_muzzles_WikiLeaks
On April 9th 2009, the internet domain registration for the investigative journalism site Wikileaks.de was suspended without notice by Germany’s registration authority DENIC. The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks’ publication of Australia’s proposed secret internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government. The publication of the Australian list exposed the blacklisting of many harmless or political sites and changed the nature of the censorship debate in Australia. The Australian government’s mandatory internet censorship proposal is now not expected to pass the Australian senate. On March 25 the German cabinet finalized its own proposal to introduce a nation-wide internet censorship system. Australia and Germany are the only Western democracies publicly considering such a mandatory censorship scheme.

Police told the newspaper that four AT&T fiber-optic cables were severed shortly before 1:30 a.m. PDT along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in South San Jose. A cable in San Carlos, Calif., owned by Sprint Nextel was also cut about two hours later, Crystal Davis, a Sprint spokeswoman confirmed.

Davis said that a manhole cover had been lifted, and the fiber underground had been cut. She confirmed that the Sprint fiber that was cut also appeared to be the work of vandals. But she explained that fiber cuts happen all the time, typically due to an accident.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/should-obama-control-internetShould President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet traffic during a state of emergency? Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) think so. On Wednesday they introduced a bill to establish the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor—an arm of the executive branch that would have vast power to monitor and control Internet traffic to protect against threats to critical cyber infrastructure. That broad power is rattling some civil libertarians.

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/australia-issues-wikileaks-linking-fine-warning-585894
The Australian communications regulator has issued a stark warning that websites who link out to ‘banned’ hyperlinks are liable to fine of up to Aus $11,000 a day. The news comes after web forum Whirlpool was threatened with the fine for posting a hyperlink to a blacklisted anti-abortion website.
Wikileaks blacklisted
One of the newest additions to Australia’s ‘blacklisted hyperlinks’ list is Wikileaks; the website that publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive info on everything from corporations, religion and governments. The blacklisting of certain pages of the site has come about after Wikileaks posted a list of websites at the tail end of 2008 that comprised the ‘secret internet censorship’ list for Denmark. On this list were over 3,500 sites that were censored or banned in the country.
Disturbing picture
While Australia’s list of blacklisted sites currently stands at 1,370, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that that list could increase to around 10,000 sites – most of which are of illegal pornographic content, but could also includes sites that house incendiary political discussions.

http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-study-links-film-piracy-to-gangs-and-terrorists-090304/
A new study by the RAND corporation has attempted to put the focus on ‘movie piracy’ squarely on the shoulders of terrorist groups and criminal gangs. The report, which claims to have been ‘peer reviewed’, seems to show that no matter which gang, thug, or terrorist – they all pirate movies. On reading the report’s summary, there is a strong wave of deja-vu. It hardly seems like 4 years have passed similar claims put out by a UK industry group were debunked. Worse still, the same old tricks are being used again to cloud the issue. The only difference is that instead of just concentrating on the situation in UK and Ireland, they’ve now gone global. The MPAA funded report report titled ‘Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism’ claims that terrorist groups use film piracy to finance their activities, while organized gangs see it as a significant revenue stream. Selling pirated goods is a ‘low-risk, high-profit enterprise’ which attracts criminals of all sorts according to the report. And, as if that is not bad enough, in some areas the influence of these pirating gangs extends into law enforcement and political leaders, who are bought, intimidated, or induced to create “protected spaces” where crime flourishes. Something that jumped out during the first glance at the report is the blurring of terms. On page 3 of the report, one of the reasons things can, and are, overstated is explained as a footnote.

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